Gear & Gadgets —

Mozilla’s Aza Raskin on the marriage of Web and TV

What do you get when you cross a Web browser with a TV? Millions of TV buyers …

Pushing the Web in new directions

There's [initially] going to be an impedance mismatch as everyone tries to cram the thought patterns that we normally associate with the Web onto the television.

JS: Do you think that the barriers to further progress on the interface front are technical, or is it more of a lack of imagination? Take the Kinect, for instance. Kinect is a technical achievement; they had to do all the preprocessing and such on the attachment hardware itself, and now you can do a lot of pretty complex voice- and gesture-based stuff with the transistors that we have now. But it sounds like a lot of the ideas that you describe—using a netbook or PC to do the bulk of the actual input for a TV, and then you just navigate this curated data on the TV—this stuff is all possible right now. We just need to build the software and think of ways to combine those things.

AR: I think that's right. It's like how people were trying to figure out how to use WAP on their phone a long time ago, and then they were like, no, we just have to show the Web, but we need a different experience for interacting with the Web on a mobile device. There's [initially] going to be an impedance mismatch as everyone tries to cram the thought patterns that we normally associate with the Web onto the television. That's not going to work, and we've seen it not work.

Moving forward, there are certainly huge numbers of opportunities to push the Web in new directions, and an open platform will enable people to do that. For example here, with Kinect, the games weren't all that interesting at launch time. What was interesting is that almost immediately, the open source community, as I think you guys reported, was able to reverse engineer it. And all the sudden we saw at least half a dozen projects (that I know of) that really started to push the boundaries and gave really fascinating looks at what one can do with the technology.

And I think the same thing will be true of Web TV—it's not going to look like the Web on a TV, that's not what we're going to end up with. It'll be something that comes a little bit from left field, that we do not see, and it's going to be because there's a platform there that enables more people to innovate more quickly. Clearly, I have a bias coming from the open source world, so take that as you will. But I do think that's where Web TV is actually going to take flight. Once you have that platform in place, you'll have a group of people that can really push and get to something that has real end-user value.

Jailbreaking your TV?

JS: Following up on that, one of the things that's interesting to me about the different Intel-based television efforts is that it's x86 hardware, so it should theoretically run Boxee or XBMC or whatever it is you want to put on it. But it's closed; it's an appliance. So Intel wants to put their x86 hardware in the television, but they don't want people to deal with all the other bad legacy stuff like malware, and stuttering, and interface issues and other stuff that comes with the PC and that they're used to and will tolerate on the Web. People won't tolerate these things on a TV.

So I think that these platforms are going to be fairly closed, and it's going to be a little harder for developers.

Given that, what are the ways that open-source developers and independent developers are going to get their software and their experiences in front of people? Are you going to have to jailbreak your television, or is HTML5 the answer?

AR: Excellent questions. I think it's ironic that they're talking about Web TV where the Web is fundamentally an open thing, and then immediately they'll close it down because that's where the revenue stream potentially is. It's another App Store.

I think, just as you were saying, that if people cannot write an application as simply as writing a webpage, an application that helps define the experience of Web TV, then we're always going to end up with a system which languishes. And it'll harm the ecosystem in the long run.

So your question to me was, how will people get around this, what is going to happen, and I'm sure that there will be a group of people that figures out some way of running their software on a piece of hardware. But whether that's useful at all in a broader context, I don't know and I'm not super bullish on it.

HTML5 as a new TV platform

JS: I don't know if this is so much a question—I just want to get your thoughts on it. One of the things that was formative for me recently was the IE9 launch, where—and I think Microsoft just did this for effect, but it had an impact nonetheless—they used these large-screen HDTVs for all of the demo stations. And they had people run their crazy Web apps on these HDTVs, and it was all GPU-accelerated so it ran nice and smooth. And it looked really good.

This experience brought a few things home to me, one of which is that, yeah, you can make some really interesting 10-foot interface experiences with HTML5, especially if you have the horsepower. And second, you do actually have to have the GPU horsepower to do some of these things. I went home and tried to run some of the demos under Chrome and Firefox on my Core i7 iMac, and, of course, it's not accelerated so it was a slideshow. So you really have to have that GPU integration.

So I guess I have a two-part question. First, where is Mozilla headed with that? And then, it sounds like to really get to the next level of HTML5 as a software delivery vehicle—you can agree or disagree, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts—we need to put even more silicon in these TVs. Just one Atom processor is kind of cool, but you need serious hardware to do really cool stuff with the Web.

AR: On the Firefox side, we now have D3D and OpenGL acceleration turned on. I'm not the best person to talk about that, though... But that's becoming table stakes—the Web needs to run really fast for a great user experience. In particular, in [Firefox] 4, especially in beta 7 and beta 8, it really zips along. All of a sudden things that were impossible to do before, like large, fullscreen rotation of objects, are now possible. Speaking purely as a designer, this is just fantastic. The number of things I can do now that I couldn't before is just amazing.

So that's absolutely right—HTML5, the Web as a platform that gives more people voice in creating exceptional experiences, is the way the world is going. Java tried to do the write-once, run-anywhere thing, and of course you know how that story turned out. HTML5 as a platform has that ability, where you can write it once and it'll run in your browser, it'll run on your mobile phone, and it'll run on your television, for fantastic user experiences. You want that cinematic experience when you sit down in front of your television; the cost of a little bit of silicon is pretty low for that sort of value. So as soon as people realize that you can get a whole bunch of designers to work for you for free, because they can write little Web apps, then there's a lot of value there. If they just think about it a little bit differently, they'll be able to unlock that.

JS: Any final, wrap-up thoughts you want to share with the audience on the topics we've covered?

AR: The main thing is just that Web TV by itself will always fail. Web TV in concert with the rest of your Web experience—that's when it will succeed. The analogy that's in my head is how Amazon dealt with their e-books. You can certainly go get a Kindle and have a great reading experience, but if I'm waiting in line and don't have my Kindle I can read it on my phone. Or if I have my computer up, I can skim a couple pages there, too. It's agnostic to the device, because your content comes with you. That's where the Web is heading. So Web TV is one interesting conduit, but if it's by itself it will fail.

JS: So "Web TV" has to be of a piece with "Web PC" and "Web phone" and "Web tablet" and everything else, in order to succeed.

AR: Yep.

Ars would like to thank Aza for his time, and we'd like to thank the Mozilla folks for lending him to us for this interview.